by Roxie Noir
Then her eyes flicker open, and she stares at me.
“Fuck,” she mutters.
“It wasn’t a dream, tiger,” I say, and she glances down.
“You get off on watching girls sleep?” she says, disdainfully.
Just you, actually, I think.
“Morning wood,” I tell her. “Biology. Don’t flatter yourself.”
“I’m anything but flattered, I promise,” she says, and sits up, then looks over her shoulder at me. “Permission to leave the bedroom to take a piss?” she says, sarcastically.
“Granted,” I say, making a grand gesture.
She walks out and closes the door.
I get out of bed and check the cell phone Manny gave me. Still nothing, but it’s been a full day. The total lack of information is starting to give me a bad feeling, a gnawing at the pit of my stomach.
Something’s not going right.
If it were going according to plan, this would be over. We’d both be home right now instead of holed up in this desert house.
I snap the flip phone shut just as Tessa comes out of the bathroom, and her eyes lock on it.
“Anything?” she asks, her voice tense.
“Not yet,” I say.
She nods and looks away.
“What happens if he won’t cooperate?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Technically, it’s true. Manny didn’t say.
But I know what will happen.
“They’ll kill me,” she says. “To send a message, or some bullshit.”
I don’t say anything.
“Will it be you?” she asks, and she looks at me again, her voice flat.
“No,” I say.
It’s not what I want to say.
The deepest, most primal part of me wants to tell her that if anyone tries to hurt her, I’ll murder them. In that moment I feel wildly, almost insanely protective of Tessa.
I shove that part down. If Manny tells me to take her out, I take her out.
If I disobey, La Carretera will kill me.
It’s pretty simple, really.
Tessa walks past me, out of the bedroom, and into the living room. I grab my white undershirt and follow her.
She flops on the couch, staring at nothing, and I make a full pot of coffee. When it’s finished, I bring her a cup. She’s already started watching Scarface, and she keeps her eyes locked on the TV for the full three hours.
We watch movies without talking for hours and hours. I heat up canned chili in the microwave for lunch, and we eat it silently. She won’t even look at me.
It’s late afternoon when she gets off the couch and heads into the bedroom.
“Hey,” I call.
She doesn’t answer.
“The fuck do you think you’re going?” I call, but there’s still no answer.
I follow her and catch up just as she’s shutting the door to the bathroom. I shove it wide open and it slams into the wall behind it.
She glares at me, angry again, and it feels good to have her mad at me after she’s been blank all day.
“Everything you do here, you do with my permission,” I say, still holding the door open.
“Or what?” she asks. “Or you kill me?”
“There are lots of other unpleasant things I can do to you,” I say. “Starting with handcuffing you to that couch for the duration of your stay here.”
“You’d like that, huh?” she spits back at me. “Then I’d be nice and docile, stuck in one place.”
“I’ll do whatever you make me do,” I say.
Now I’ve got her backed against the sink and I’m towering over her, but she doesn’t look cowed in the least.
“You tricked me,” she says.
This again, I think.
“Every so often I think, hey, Alex is kind of okay. He’s got a shitty job, but underneath, he’s a human. But you keep proving me wrong. I’m stuck out here, where I can’t do a goddamn thing, and you’re being a dick about me going to the bathroom. Congratulations,” she says, her voice pure acid. “You can bully a girl.”
“I’m following orders,” I say, leaning down and putting my face inches in front of hers. “And if you really want to see cruelty, you should talk to me like that again.”
Furious silence.
“Okay,” I say, and leave the bathroom.
I walk back to the couch. A minute later she comes walking out, her face rigid with fury, and I ignore her, staring pointedly at the TV.
Then she wrenches open the front door and darts down the steps.
“Hey!” I shout, leaping to my feet.
Oh, fuck, I think. What the hell is she doing?
The car keys are still in my pocket, and when I get to the door she’s sprinting through the gate in the fence, barefoot, and running into the desert beyond.
I chase her as far as the fence and then stop, just watching.
It’s not like she’s going anywhere. Fucking let her get sunburned and dehydrated. She’ll come crawling back in twenty minutes, begging me to handcuff her to the couch in exchange for a glass of water.
I follow her with my eyes for a few more minutes. She’s walking now, her steps more careful. The wind whips her dress to one side and it snags in some small, low bushes.
It’s strikingly beautiful: a gorgeous woman, walking into the desert in a ball gown.
I check the cell phone again, praying for Manny to tell me I can take her back to LA and be done with Tessa forever.
Nothing. Fuck.
Her father will capitulate, I remind myself. They always do.
Out the window, her form gets smaller and smaller as the minutes tick by. I thought she’d be back in thirty minutes, then forty-five, then an hour. Now it’s been almost an hour and fifteen minutes, the thermometer outside says one ten, and she’s still heading away.
I can’t believe the fucking nerve on this girl, but it’s my job to make sure we’ve even got a hostage, so I throw a few bottles of water into the SUV and drive after her.
It’s slow going over the rough terrain, but I’m still a lot faster than her. The moment she hears me, she starts heading for a deep wash, a spot the car can’t get into, but I’m faster.
I pull up alongside her and wind down the passenger side window.
“Get in,” I call.
She flips me off. I stop the car and get out, expecting her to run again, but she doesn’t. She just stands there, awkwardly, watching me with an expression I can’t read.
Then I look down and see the bloody footprints in the dirt, and I realize why she’s standing like that.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” I tell her.
“Go fuck yourself,” she says, but she sounds a little tired.
I walk up to her and go to grab her, but she swings an arm at me wildly, and it throws her off-balance. She takes a step to correct herself, then gasps.
I catch her as she falls, and for once, she doesn’t resist. I load her into the passenger seat and buckle her in. She’s awake, but she’s gone limp.
I press a water bottle into her hand and shut the door, then get into the driver’s side, and start the tricky drive back to the house. She’s guzzling the water, rivulets running down her throat and under the neckline of her dress.
It would be alluring if she didn’t seem so suddenly fragile, so out of it. It’s my job to keep her safe, and I fucking failed. Instead her feet are bleeding all over the floor of the SUV.
When I drive up to the house I get out of the car and walk around to her side. She’s already got the door open, and she’s bracing herself on it, her knuckles white.
One foot hits the ground, and she gasps. I walk up to her.
“Don’t touch me,” she says, but her voice doesn’t quite have the same snarl as before.
I can’t help but smile. She had me worried for a minute there.
I ignore her and pick her up in a fireman’s carry over my left shoulder as she shouts at me. She kicks a littl
e and pounds on my back, but she’s gonna have to do better than that.
“Put me down,” she growls. “I can walk myself, for fuck’s sake.”
I think of bloody footprints across the desert floor. I’ve seen much, much worse, but thinking of those footprints makes my stomach twist like nothing else.
I ignore her and walk into the house, careful not to hit her ass on the door frame.
“God damn it, Alex,” she says, but she’s stopped kicking, at least.
I slide her around into my arms and then put her down on the couch where she sits, glaring at me. Her cheekbones and shoulders are bright red, but it’s her feet I can’t stop looking at.
They’re a filthy, bloody mess. The bottom of her dress is shredded, and her ankles are pretty torn up, blood dripping down.
The soles of her feet are almost raw, and as I look closer, I can see that she’s stepped on something. It’s embedded in her left foot.
“When were you going to stop?” I ask, still staring at her feet.
“When I collapsed,” she said.
I believe her, completely.
“You’re an idiot,” I say. “You’d rather die in the desert than wait here another twenty-four hours?”
“Shut up,” she says, and closes her eyes, leaning her head back against the couch.
16
Tessa
He’s right, and I know it. Even if he’s going to shoot me later, that’s a better death than the one I could have had, slowly dehydrating in the desert while vultures circle overhead.
I don’t say anything, because what the hell am I supposed to say?
Thanks for proving again how trapped I am?
You’re right, I should just wait here, patiently, until some rescuer comes along?
No, thanks.
I can hear him doing something in the kitchen, but I just keep my eyes closed. My feet hurt so much that they barely feel like feet, and more like two orbs of stabbing pain connected to my ankles.
I probably can’t even make it to the bathroom right now, unless I crawl. Somehow, I managed to do the one thing that’s made sure I’ll never get out of here, and all because I was angry and scared.
I hear Alex’s footsteps coming back to the couch where I’m sitting, and I open my eyes as he sets a big pot full of water in front of me, next to a red duffel bag. He pulls a water bottle out of the pot and hands it to me, and I take it and drink.
“Lift up your feet,” he says, and I do. He slides the pot full of water under them, and then he takes my calves in his hands and lowers them.
“This is gonna sting,” he says.
I shut my eyes, and holy fuck is he right.
When my feet his the water I gasp and my body goes rigid. I bite down on one knuckle, absolutely determined not to cry in front of him, even as I’m practically hyperventilating.
I keep my eyes shut. I don’t think I can look at him right now, because I’m just humiliated. I’ve tried to act brave, tried to act like being taken hostage by some criminal organization doesn’t scare me. But it fucking does.
Right now, I don’t feel feisty or brave or strong or anything. I feel like a terrified idiot. I feel like what I am: just some clueless girl who’s gotten swept up in something sinister.
There is nothing I can do, and that feels worse than walking barefoot over a cactus.
Alex is scooping water over my ankles and letting it trickle back into the pot he’s using as a basin. For a moment, I let myself be surprised at how gentle his hands are.
“Lift your right foot up,” he says, and I do. My eyes are still closed.
“This is gonna hurt more,” he says.
I hold my breath, and something soft presses against the sole of my foot. It feels like I’ve just stepped on a stove, and my foot tries to jerk away but Alex has a grip on it.
Then he lets go, wiping the water off my calf.
“This foot isn’t so bad,” he says.
He’s holding me by the calf again, my knee almost straight. I can feel him inspect the bottom of my foot.
“Did you walk into a cactus?” he asks.
“I didn’t see it,” I say.
“I figured,” he says.
I can hear him rummage through the bag, and at last, I work up the nerve to open my eyes.
He’s kneeling in front of me, his undershirt splashed with pink water, and he pulls a pair of tweezers out of the duffel bag. Then he looks at me.
“Let me guess, it’s gonna hurt,” I say.
That gets a slight smile.
“I’d get you drunk if we had any alcohol here,” he said. “We used to keep a couple handles of vodka around, half for disinfecting and half for making things hurt less. I don’t know what happened to it.”
“It’s fine,” I say, gritting my teeth.
The spines are in the side of my foot, and a shudder works its way through me as he closes the tweezers on the first one and pulls, but he’s fast and his hands are sure and it’s over almost before I can take a breath.
“Done,” he says, and I relax for another moment.
He takes my other foot out of the water and dries it, and then he examines it for a long time. Too long.
“You’ve gotten something embedded in there,” he says. “It’s gonna be tricky.”
I swallow. Then something occurs to me.
“Take me to a hospital,” I say.
He doesn’t answer.
“It could get infected,” I point out. “I could lose a foot.”
Alex is going through the duffel bag, and he comes out with a very long, sharp pair of tweezers.
“I guess you should have thought of that before walking two miles barefoot through the desert,” he says.
He puts the tweezers on the towel, then also grabs some kind squirt bottle, some gauze. My stomach clenches, and I try to pull my foot away.
“I need a doctor,” I say. “Something besides a guy with tweezers and vodka who probably didn’t graduate high school.”
“I told you there’s no vodka,” he says, with a forced, steely calm.
“Take me to someone with medical training,” I say, on the verge of pleading.
This is my last resort. After this ploy, I’ve got nothing.
“This could be really bad,” I say.
Alex sits back on his heels, and he looks at me for a long time, like he’s thinking about something.
“When I was eleven, I dug a bullet out of my cousin on my mother’s kitchen table,” he finally says.
“Eleven?” I whisper, and he shrugs.
“He was older. Seventeen, I think, and already mixed up in all this. He and another cousin got shot, and my mother’s basement apartment was the closest place they could go. My other cousin had been shot in the shoulder, so he couldn’t get the bullet out himself.”
He looks at a spot on the wall behind my head. Remembering.
“I had a steak knife and a carving fork,” Alex says. “And Pablo was leaning against the wall, his shirt covered in blood, as he told me how to dig the bullet out of his brother. I’d barely seen blood before, and never that much. I’d never had to dig through someone’s flesh like that.”
My stomach is doing flip-flops.
He shrugs.
“I did it,” he says. “I got the bullet out. When my mother got home, she wasn’t even surprised, just upset that I’d had to do it instead of her or my brother. I had no idea my mother knew how to treat bullet wounds.”
“Why not go to the hospital?” I whisper.
“They report gunshot wounds,” he says. “The last thing we wanted was the police involved.”
“Did he live?”
“A couple more years, yeah.”
We’re quiet again, and then Alex lifts my foot.
“I’ll be quick,” he says, and before I can protest, the tweezers are under my flesh, digging for the rock that I’ve embedded in my skin.
“Fuck!” I shout. “Jesus fucking Christ fucking shit fuck!”
<
br /> I keep going, and after what seems like forever, Alex is holding up a pebble in the tweezers.
“That’s it?” I ask. It felt like he was digging out a Mack truck.
“It’s a lot to be embedded in your foot,” he says. “But yeah. That’s it.”
I slump back onto the couch, a sweaty mess, and he pulls gauze and bandages out of the duffel bag. He bandages my feet carefully, almost tenderly, and I watch.
“You never told me what the date on your arm was,” I say, suddenly.
I didn’t look that closely before, but it’s obviously a life:
5/2/1984
-
4/13/2004
Nineteen. Whoever that tattoo is for was nineteen when they died.
“They got killed,” I say, still looking at it.
His hands don’t falter, but they pause.
“He,” Alex says.
He finishes wrapping the bandage and anchors it against itself. I look down at my mummy-like feet and feel stupid all over again, like some dumb, spoiled brat who has to be taken care of every minute of her life.
After a moment he pulls a bottle of Advil from the duffel bag and hands it to me. I dump four into my palm and swig them down with water from the bottle as Alex puts the supplies back in the bag. He takes the bag to the utility room and the pot of bloody water to the shower, where he dumps it out.
Then he walks back to me and holds out one hand.
“Can you stand up?” he asks.
I look at his hand. Everything in me wants to ignore it and stand on my own, just to prove to him that I can.
Just this once, accept some help, I think.
I take his hand and the muscles in his arm bunch as he pulls me to my feet.
It fucking hurts, but not as bad as it did.
I get lightheaded for a minute and close my eyes and then his hands are around my shoulders, holding me up, skin against skin.
“I’m fine,” I say, and he lets me go to walk gingerly around the house, trying to get used to this. I feel like the Little Mermaid, the original story, except instead of agreeing to walk on knives in exchange for being with the man I love, it’s just because I was an idiot.
Alex is leaning against the kitchen island, watching me.